APPENDIX. 173 



H. You might as well ask me to explain the difference of size in 

 salmon, which varies from six pounds to fifty pounds, and some- 

 times sixty pounds. The only way it can be accounted for is, that 

 the large salmon are the produce of rivers or their tributaries so 

 formed by nature as to produce a large-sized fish, other rivers 

 producing a salmon of a small size. The same law holds good 

 in rivers producing grilse ; and although there are occasion- 

 ally very large grilse met with, the aggregate size of one year 

 does not vary much with that of another throughout the season. 

 Hence it is that we have the average of six pounds' weight 

 in May, and a similar size in October ; but if grilse grew to 

 be salmon, and as rapidly as is generally supposed, we should 

 have no grilse in October, but all salmon. 



M. Suppose now that such of the grilse and salmon as have 

 escaped the various snares, which the ingenuity of man and 

 the watchfulness of the fishers have placed in their way, have 

 arrived in the rivers for the purpose of spawning, when do 

 you think that operation takes place ? 



H. From experience and induction, I believe that the pro- 

 cess of spawning takes place chiefly in the month of Novem- 

 ber. From experience, because year after year I have seen 

 them crowding the fords, spawning in that month ; which 

 feature is particularly observable in the tributary streams 

 falling into a loch, wherein they are not seen throughout the 

 year, except in the month of November, for the purpose of 

 spawning, and then they are to be seen in multitudes. This 

 is the case in a remarkable degree in Loch-na-Shalag and 

 Loch Maree, on the west coast of Eoss-shire. The same in- 

 stinct is very conspicuously exemplified in the char, a 

 beautiful and highly-flavoured fish, found in many Highland 

 lochs, and particularly numerous in the above-mentioned 

 Loch-na-Shalag, but which, from its habit of remaining in the 

 deepest parts of the loch, can be but seldom caught by the 

 fisherman. It is a well-known peculiarity in these fish, that 

 at an appointed time, in October, they quit the lochs, keeping 

 clear of intermixing with the innumerable families of trout, 

 and betake themselves in shoals and nations, with stereotyped 

 regularity, to the tributary streams, for the purpose of spawn- 



